The European Union’s anti-fraud agency has accused Marine Le Pen and several of her party members – including her father – of embezzling around €620,000 while she was a member of the European Parliament.
France’s investigative website Mediapart published a section of the new 116 report alleging that MEPs misused EU funds for national party ends.
The claims come a week before the second round of the April 24 presidential election, in which Le Pen will face Emmanuel Macron.
A spokesman for Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (Rallye National) party questioned the timing of the allegations. Le Pen’s lawyer, Rodolphe Bosselut, told Agence France-Presse that he was “dismayed that Olaf [the European anti-fraud office] acts”. He insisted some of the reports referred to “old facts more than 10 years old”.
“Marine Le Pen denies this. She denies this without having access to the details of the charges. It’s a manipulation; unfortunately I’m not surprised,” Bosselut told French broadcaster BFMTV.
According to Mediapart, Olaf sent the report to French investigators in March. It accused Le Pen of having personally siphoned off almost 137,000 euros in EU funds during her time as MEP between 2004 and 2017. her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen; Louis Aliot, her former partner and former Vice-President of the RN, who is now Mayor of Perpignan; and Bruno Gollnisch, another party heavyweight, are also cited in the report as abusers of public funds. All have denied any wrongdoing.
In an incident reported by Mediapart in 2010, Marine Le Pen allegedly demanded €5,000 for hotel rooms for 13 far-right party members to attend a conference entitled “European Regions and the Financial Crisis”. However, one of the participants reportedly wrote to the European Parliament, claiming that the meeting was used to discuss party leadership. The unnamed attendee told investigators Le Pen hung a European flag along the way for photos to be taken and then ordered colleagues to “clean up that shit.”
The Paris public prosecutor said the file would be “examined”.
None of those named in the report are accused of personal gain, instead claiming EU funds to pay for RN – formerly Front National (FN) – staff and events. Le Pen said she was unaware she had done anything wrong.
Le Pen has been under investigation since 2018 on allegations of “breach of trust” and “misuse of public funds” over the alleged use of EU funds for European parliamentary assistants to finance party staff salaries. That same year, an EU court ruled that the bloc could recover more than €41,000 in public funds that Le Pen had used to pay her bodyguard, a former paratrooper who was her father’s safety for 20 years.
Bosselut said Le Pen was “not summoned by any French judicial authority” and accused European authorities of not sending him or Le Pen the final report.
He said the Olaf investigation opened in 2016 and Le Pen was questioned in writing by mail in March 2021.
The latest opinion poll released by Ipsos for FranceInfo and Le Parisien suggests Macron could win next week’s runoff by 10 percentage points.
Both candidates are trying to woo supporters of far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who narrowly qualified for the second round. On Sunday, Mélenchon released the outcome of a consultation of 310,000 paid supporters on how the 7.7 million people who voted for him last week would vote next Sunday. Of the more than 215,000 participants, nearly 38% said they would cast a blank vote, while 33.4% said they would vote for Macron and just under 29% said they would abstain.
“The outcome of this consultation is not an instruction to anyone. It reflects the opinions of the 215,292 participants. Everyone will conclude and vote according to their own conscience,” Mélenchon’s campaign team said in a statement.